Rapid reproduction of documents by photocopying has been performed for many years, with continuous efforts directed to improving the speed of reproduction, the resolution of the replicas and the capacity of the photocopying machines.
Various processes exist for photocopying documents with a dominant process being the xerographic process. Basically, the xerographic process proceeds by: electrically charging the surface of a rotating belt or drum; selectively discharging a portion of the charged surface by reflecting a light pattern off an original document to be copied onto the charged surface to leave a charge pattern only in the form of the printed matter of the original document; adhering dye material (toner) to the charged portion of the surface; transferring the toner to a sheet of copy paper; and securing the toner to the copy paper.
Among the efforts to enhance the advantages of photocopying has been an attempt to provide a means to serially mark or paginate the documents reproduced in the photo reproduction process.
In about 1977, Radionics, Inc., Rochester, N.Y., developed a method and mechanism by which serial marking of reproduced documents could be achieved. The method employed an opaque tape on the photocopier document-receiving platen to prevent discharging of a local area of each document charge image produced on the charged surface and thereafter discharge of a portion of the local area by a light pattern in the form of one of a sequence of numbers stored in a light source.